" Slowly she reared up on end
until at last she was absolutely perpendicular. Then quite quietly but quicker and
quicker, she seemed to slide away ..and disappear."

This oral
eyewitness account of the sinking of the Titanic, delivered in a crisp British accent by
the ship's Second Officer, a Mr.Lightoller, is one of the details that
makes "Titanic" a spectacular and fascinating exhibition.

The
horror and courage of that night, are highlighted in the exhibition by a dramatic
reconstruction of the actual sinking.

The centre piece is a scale
model of the foundering Titanic built by David Tedford, model maker at the Ulster Folk and
Transport Museum, which captures the atmosphere and the feeling of terror that must have
pervaded the doomed decks of the liner as she went down.

Titanic - Legend and Truths
Are Raised Again

The
exhibition tells the whole story of the Titanic from her construction, loss and subsequent
legend to the exciting discovery of her rusted, empty hull on the Atlantic seabed in 1985.
By combining original Titanic material with vintage photographs, recordings, newsreel
footage of the time , shock newspaper front pages and music, the exhibition creates a
sense of the era as well as the catastrophe. The purpose of the exhibition is not only to
inform, but also to trigger the visitors imagination, emotion and sense of mortality.

On the night of
14th/15th April 1912 the White Star Liner, R.M.S. Titanic foundered in the North Atlantic
with great loss of life. It was the most horrific shipping disaster ever to occur in
peacetime. Titanic, the largest and most luxurious liner in the world, was making her
maidenvoyagefrom Southampton to New York when she
struck an iceberg and sank within two and a half hours. Her hull was pierced below the
waterline for a length of 300 feet, and the enormous rush of water,with
which the pumps and system of hull division could not cope, doomed the ship.

The
tragedyof the collision was that there were not enough lifeboats to save the
2201 people on board, and of the 20 available lifeboats, not all were filled to capacity.

The Cunard liner Carpathia
picked up only 712 survivors when she arrived on the scene four hours after receiving
Titanic's wireless distress signals.

To commemorate the
75th anniversary in 1987 of the loss of the Titanic, this major exhibition opened at the
Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Here, in Belfast, the disaster has a special poignancy,
as the Titanic was built in Harland and Wolff LTD's Queens Island shipyard and there is a
thwarted pride in her memory.

The Titanic
was registered at 46,328 gross tons with a length of 852.3 feet and at the time was the
largest ship ever built. After a launch on 31st May 1911, she was completed and
delivered on 2nd April 1912 to her owners, The White Star Line.

For 86 years the Titanic
has maintained a powerful hold on the imagination of people throughout the world. Despite
the magnitude of other horrors, Titanic remains the ultimate symbol of disaster. The
exhibition suggests it is because the Titanic story is an universal lesson in the mystery
of the human condition. It is a dramatic revelation of human fallibility and nobility in a
capricious and uncertain world.